Rhys Chatham
A Crimson Grail

We were talking a little while ago about Rhys Chatham and his early works.

During the second half of the '90s, he kind of paused (devoting himself sparingly to the trumpet), partly due to an ailment affecting his ears naturally caused by overexposure to the watts of amplifiers (the hundred guitars of "An Angel Move Too Fast To See" are no laughing matter). Rhys lived quietly in Paris over the last decade with a personal drone accompanying him daily: almost learning to appreciate it, studying the sensation it produced, and trying to understand what the right tone was.

Then one day the auditory organ reconciles with this absolute master and a little later the City of Paris commissions Rhys to create a piece for Nuit Blanche: a work to be performed at the Sacré-Cœur Basilica of Montmartre. And that's when the spark ignites and love happens: the building conveys to the composer a feeling both sacred and primordial... Chatham reconnects with his drone (with the disappearance of this and newfound freedom) and creates a music both filtering and ecstatic, immensely cathartic and closely related to its historical point of origin: it would be impossible to imagine elsewhere the four hundred guitars of "A Crimson Grail" and even the vast audience initially unaware of the richness and evocative power of the rite they are witnessing.

If previously one could talk about hard-rock scansions and cacophonous dissonances conjugated according to minimalist canons for the New Yorker's music, now it is almost impossible to associate this latest work with a genre: just an intangible and luminous flow of notes coming from the 2400 strings played in perfect synchrony.

Three very delicate and celestial movements make up the content of this album (fifty-six minutes chosen from a total of almost twelve hours of performance). Aggressiveness has now given way to admirable cosmic tendencies and it would not even seem like there are so many guitars, their lightness is so unsustainable.

Chatham's music could have been defined as a sort of tyrannical attempt to conquer the light, an imposing army with the purpose of overthrowing the earthly and divine status quo, a challenge reflected in Prometheus' mythical rebellion and the failed alchemical pursuit of the Philosopher's Stone. Now triumph has arrived: in the imperceptible chase of the first section, in the transcendent implosion of the second and in the solemn religious deconstruction of the third lies the dawn of a new world (and the four hundred guitarists officiating at the ceremony are its priests, involuntary and available avant-gardists: further reminder to understand the collective nature of the entire performance).

Epic and wonderful listening, enriched by the conceptual and evocative value of the whole. And besides the beauty of the music, one is amazed by the broad-mindedness of the Parisian municipal management: if only events like this would even enter the minds of "our" political representatives...